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Always Connected: Tips for Separating Your Work Life From Your Home Life
Many of us have a certain degree of flexibility regarding where and how we get our work done, but this can inevitably create some blurred lines when trying to separate your work life from your home life.
Taking advantage of toll free numbers for small businesses is one way to achieve that separation, as you can gain control over the calls you are receiving, allowing you to stay connected and focused on work when you want to and divert those calls when it is family time.
Get some balance in your life
There are probably a fair few of us in that situation who have been juggling their time between home and work commitments and might have formed the opinion that achieving a genuine work-life balance is an unattainable dream.
The consequences of digital mobility simply means we are contactable 24/7 and every time your smartphone pings to notify you of another message arriving in your inbox, the temptation is always there to take a look and deal with it.
This behavior pattern has been encouraged and fueled by an increasing always-available work culture, which may well have boosted productivity levels, but this progress has come at a cost to our personal lives, and even sometimes our health.
It might therefore be time to take a step back, look at what you consider to be your current work-life boundaries, and find a way to restore some proper balance back in your life.
Always available
It is estimated that at least 120 million workers in the U.S could now be classed as mobile workers, which means that the “office” of today is just as likely to be a cafe, hotel or kitchen table, rather than the sort of glass-fronted air-conditioned place where many used to head on a daily basis not so long ago.
This level of flexibility in your working arrangements definitely has its advantages, but it also makes you more potentially always available when it comes to work, which is why you need to set some boundaries in terms of when you are working and when you are on family and personal business.
Answering calls and replying to any emails that you think need a quick response, will make you popular with coworkers and maybe your boss if you have one, but it should be remembered that many business-related scenarios that you have to deal with, can often wait until you are back in work mode.
Neither one thing or the other
Focus is a term used extensively in business and motivational context, but when you are struggling to separate your work from your family life and don’t have any real element of discipline in terms of how you attempt to do this, you can soon lose focus and become neither one thing or the other.
Doing your work efficiently requires an element of focus and undivided attention, which is also the case when you are spending some time with your family and having a period of leisure time.
When you don’t set any clear divisions as to when you are working and when you are not, you can easily end up lacking any sort of real focus and never really be “in the moment”.
There is a good chance that you will be at your professional best when you divide your time and availability more rigidly, allowing you to get the best out of both your work and your leisure time, rather than a bit of a fudge between the two distinct aspects of your life.
Dress for the occasion
One way of achieving a distinction between when you are working and when you are not, is to put yourself into either mode and dress appropriately for the occasion.
What this means is using your attire to put you in the right mindset. If you doing a day’s work and want to be focused on the tasks ahead, it can often help to choose clothes that are a bit more formal and signify that you are engaged in work activities rather than enjoying some downtime.
When you have finished your allotted tasks and it is time to down tools, get changed into something more comfortable. You might just be surprised at how effective this tactic is in allowing you to create a distinction between work and play and if it persuades you to divert that call or ignore the email until you are back in work mode, so much the better for you and everyone around you.
Mark Gordon is the president of American Voice Mail, a cloud telecommunications provider. He founded and built the business to allow small and medium business to compete and win, by giving them the most state of the art communications tools, all with no equipment to buy, fix or outgrow.
